My father, who died at the age of 90 last month, enjoyed reading the British author and former politician Jeffrey Archer’s novels. Ever since he bought the first one, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (1976) at an airport bookstore in the late 1970s, he became a fan. In the later years of his life, when he found it difficult to focus on serious texts, I often saw my father rereading Archer’s novels — though he did not care for the prison memoirs.
His own life
Archer’s books, however flat and formulaic the prose, are compulsively readable. Beginning with the opening lines of his first novel: “Making a million legally has always been difficult. Making a million illegally has always been a little easier. Keeping a million when you have made it is perhaps the most difficult of all.” Four men — an Oxford academic, a doctor, an art dealer, and a peer — have been swindled out of their life’s savings by the shady multi-millionaire Harvey Metcalfe. The four strangers come together to plan a heist and get their money back, to the last penny, in an entertaining Ocean’s Eleven kind of caper novel.
According to Archer, who died aged 86 this week, the novel was based on his own experience and his urgent need for income. He had been one of the youngest Members of Parliament of his time, elected in 1969 as a Conservative MP, but a failed investment and near-bankruptcy in 1974 compelled him to stand down from his parliamentary seat and sell the family house.
The novel reportedly sold only 3,000 copies initially, but went on to become a bestseller. Meanwhile, his wife Mary’s academic job at Cambridge kept the family afloat while Archer began his writing career.
Scale of ambition
While critics dismiss Archer’s fiction for the potboiler style, contrivance, and melodrama, readers across the world keep buying his books, especially in airports and railway bookstalls, and even pirated copies at traffic signals. It is not only the plot or the fast pace that grabs their attention, but also the sheer scale of ambition. Kane and Abel (1979), Archer’s bestselling novel, which has reportedly sold 50 million copies across the world, is a saga of capitalism and enterprise. The two main characters are born in very different circumstances and have very different lives, but along with a common birthday, they share a limitless ambition. Both are given tumultuous childhoods spanning continents: a forest birth, a war, Siberia, a death on the Titanic. The banker William Kane is a member of the Boston elite; the businessman Abel Rosnovski is a Polish immigrant in America. Through the Great Depression, the Second World War, and beyond, the two men’s lives are connected in ways they do not fully realise until it is too late. Of course, being an Archer novel, the most enduring connection is made when their children meet. This golden goose of a story continues over three generations and two more novels.
If Archer’s middlebrow fiction keeps returning to themes of meteoric rise, ruin, and recovery, it is perhaps because his life did the same, except with far more self-promotion and hubris. He was born in London in 1940 and grew up in Weston-super-Mare, a childhood hometown that would later return in his career as his title and entry into the House of Lords.
Archer’s first novel was born out of his troubles, and so were his prison diaries, years later. Between these books came years in public life, a hunger for visibility, a tendency to self-promotion, and an inveterate snobbishness: a Conservative Party deputy chairmanship, a peerage, and a London mayoral candidacy that ended in 1999. A key point in the midst of this trajectory was a 1987 libel case against the tabloid newspaper Daily Star for its allegation that he had slept with a prostitute, Monica Coghlan. Although Archer won £500,000 in damages, his testimony was later shown to be false, leading to his conviction in 2001 for perjury and perverting the course of justice.
Writing in jail
“As we draw up to the entrance gate, I see a sign declaring BELMARSH PRISON. Some wag has put a line through the B and replaced it with an H. Not the most propitious of welcomes.”
A Prison Diary is a three-volume account of Archer’s life in multiple prisons: Belmarsh, Wayland, North Sea Camp, and Lincoln.
In the first volume, written after three weeks in jail, Archer doesn’t reflect on the reasons why he has been sentenced to serve time in the high-security prison. Egregiously, and self-servingly, he prefaces the narrative with William Henley’s poem Invictus — the poem that Nelson Mandela famously drew sustenance from during his 27 years of imprisonment. Elsewhere, Archer alludes to Oscar Wilde. Nevertheless, A Prison Diary is no De Profundis, and Archer is no victim other than of his own vanities. With a stubborn refusal to reflect on his own acts or hubris, he comments disdainfully about other prisoners and the reasons for their incarceration. About the first volume (2002), Kirkus Reviews noted: “Archer is a known recidivist. He will write again.” Prescient words, for Archer would write two more volumes of his prison diary.
Making a million is hard, and keeping it harder. It involves ambition and occasionally its uglier synonym, greed. Archer made his millions, lost them, rebuilt his life, and, in the end, refused to reflect on his doings. Instead, he packaged and sold the prison years as well, fully monetising his disgrace.
(Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta is in the IAS)